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The Martian Chronicles

Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor - of crystal pillars and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars...and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

I Sing the Body Electric!: And Other Stories

The mind of Ray Bradbury is a wonder-filled carnival of delight and terror that stretches from the verdant Irish countryside to the coldest reaches of outer space. Yet all his work is united by one common thread: a vivid and profound understanding of the vast set of emotions that bring strength and mythic resonance to our frail species. Bradbury characters may find themselves anywhere - and anywhen.

The Golden Apples of the Sun: And Other Stories

Ray Bradbury is a modern cultural treasure. His disarming simplicity of style underlies a towering body of work unmatched in metaphorical power by any other American storyteller. And here are 32 of his most famous tales - prime examples of the poignant and mysterious poetry that Bradbury uniquely uncovers in the depths of the human soul, the otherwordly portraits that spring from the canvas of one of the century's great men of imagination.

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."

The Halloween Tree

On a Halloween night, eight boys are led on an incredible journey into the past by the mysterious “spirit” Moundshroud. Riding a dark autumn wind from ancient Egypt to the land of the Celtic druids, from Mexico to a cathedral in Paris, they will witness the haunting beginnings of the holiday called Halloween.

Necronomicon

Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s, H. P. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when first published. This tome brings together all of Lovecraft's harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were when first released.

Brave New World

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Death Is a Lonely Business

Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend, who is away studying in Mexico, the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary efforts - until strange things begin happening around him.

1984: New Classic Edition

George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police - a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, a hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: A Radio Dramatization

The people of Earth are preparing for war - a war that could potentially destroy the planet. Explorers are sent to Mars to find a new place for humans to colonize. Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor, where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars... and then is conquered by it.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Long After Midnight

Fantastic or conventional, chillingly suspenseful, or hauntingly nostalgic, each of these stories has that aura of the unexpected combined with the special ring of absolute rightness that is brilliantly, uniquely Bradbury.

A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories

Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is an enduring masterwork of twentieth-century American literature - a chilling vision of a dystopian future built on the foundations of ignorance, censorship, and brutal repression. The origins and evolution of Bradbury’s darkly magnificent tale are explored in A Pleasure to Burn, a collection of sixteen selected shorter works that prefigure the grand master’s landmark novel.

Animal Farm

George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture, quoted so often that we tend to forget who wrote the original words! This must-read is also a must-listen!

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

From early work like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre", through classic stories including "The Star", "Earthlight", "The Nine Billion Names of God", and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), all the way to later work like "A Meeting with Medusa" and "The Hammer of God", this comprehensive short story collection encapsulates one of the great science fiction careers of all time.

On Cats

On Cats offers Bukowski's musings on these beloved animals and their toughness and resiliency. He honors them as fighters, hunters, survivors who command awe and respect as they grip tightly on to the world around them: "A cat is only ITSELF, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go."

Based upon the graphic novels by Joe Harris - with creative direction from series creator Chris Carter - and adapted specifically for the audio format by aural auteur Dirk Maggs (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Alien: Out of the Shadows), Cold Cases marks yet another thrilling addition to the pantheon of X-Files stories. Featuring a mind-blowing and otherworldly soundscape of liquefying aliens, hissing creatures, and humming spacecraft, listeners get to experience the duo's investigations like never before.

Faithful: A Novel

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend's future is destroyed in an accident while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor filled with emotion, from dark suffering to true happiness - a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world.

Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.

Norse Mythology

Neil Gaiman has long been inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction. Now he turns his attention back to the source, presenting a bravura rendition of the great northern tales. In Norse Mythology, Gaiman fashions primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds; delves into the exploits of the deities, dwarves, and giants; and culminates in Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time and people.

X Minus One: Old Time Radio Shows, Volume 1

X Minus One is widely considered one of the best science fiction radio series to ever be broadcast. Featuring stories written by Ray Bradbury, Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other science fiction writing luminaries, X Minus One set the bar for excellence in radio drama.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, an earthling born and educated on Mars, who arrives on Earth with superhuman powers and a total ignorance of the mores of man. Smith is destined to become a freak, a media commodity, a scam artist, a searcher, and finally, a messiah.

American Gods [TV Tie-In]

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life. But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow's best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday.

Publisher's Summary

The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury - a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The images, ideas, sounds, and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness; the sight of grey dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere; the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the grandmaster's premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.

That Ray Bradbury will ultimately be remembered as one of the finest writers of fiction of the 20th century is a virtual certainty, and the stories contained in this collection are some of the best examples of his remarkable body of work. The bujilding suspense and ultimate horror of "The Veldt." The unrelenting despair of "The Long Rain." The gentle wistfulness of "The Rocket Man." These stories are Bradbury at the peak of his powers and are treasures, each unto itself. Tied together in this volume they represent a literary feast.

I could go on and on about Bradbury, but the other real treasure of this edition is Scott Brick's absolutely remarkable narration. Brick captures every emotion that Bradbury wrote into these stories, delivering them with mastery, feeling and style that often transform passages from prose to pure poetry. I found myself often backing up a disk (I burn to CDs) just to hear Brick's delivery of a passage once again. Whenever I acquire an audiobook read by Scott Brick I expect a wonderful listening experience, but this reading was off the charts. Immediately prior to this edition I hear Brick's reading of Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," which was also wonderful. However, in the case of "The Illustrated Man," something about his reading was different, deeper, more engaged and immersed in the tone and meaning of the stories. This is one of the best audiobook experiences I have ever enjoyed.

Loved this collection and the performance of it. Really drives into a lot of the pressure points in the genre.

Any one notice though, the narrator's character voices all sound like they are just on the verge of weeping, no matter who they are or what they're doing? It's really effective, but gets sorta old after a bunch of these stories in a row.

My sincere apologies for my original review maligning the performance, the speed was wrong on my device. I corrected that and the rest of my listening experience was good.

I remember these stories from when I was a kid,The Vekt always being my favorite, but now that I'm all grown up and listened to these, I found several more that I'd either forgotten or just never understood when I was a kid so didn't remember. Made me buy the movie so I can watch that again too. It was fun "reading" this book again after so many years.

The Illustrated Man is a telling of the stories of each illustration tattooed on his body. Each story is told like an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Most of the stories have a deeper message within it. I would be interested to hear how the last two generations view these stories since some of the features of technology are no longer fiction but actuality. I also wonder how they would view some of the social issues that are no longer present today. Makes one wonder if Bradbury saw the future or if the readers of the past were so enamored by his ideas they sought to bring them to fruition.

Where does The Illustrated Man rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Love the stories but the reader irritates me, not his voice but the constant inflection in the downward direction. He should reserve those tones for endings. I'm going to avoid this reader in the future.

This book had just about everything I wanted from a novel. Space travel, time travel, deception and wacky stories altogether. The narraration was great, but to keep up, I had to read it on at least 1.25x or else the narration was a bit slow.

Scott Brick is one of my favorite performers. Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably my favorite audiobook. However, although this is a cleverly packaged format of short stories, the editing (or, lack thereof) suffers IMMENSELY. There is not one iota of a pause between chapters. In fact they roll into one another as if the end of one chapter's sentence segues right into the first sentence of the next chapter, as if they were the same sentence. This nearly drove me mad, making the audio book HORRIBLE.

Would you ever listen to anything by Ray Bradbury again?

I will ALWAYS listen to Something Wicked This Way Comes every Halloween.

What does Scott Brick bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Great inflection. Great nuance. Sorry, Scott, that the editing sucks here.

It is amazing to think these stories were written in the 1940s to early 50s. The sociopolitical comment in stories like The Other Foot are as relevant today as then. Be aware there us little or no gap between the stories on the recording, shame, as the narrator does a good job

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